


Death Note

by smirnoffmule



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post Exit Wounds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-04-22
Updated: 2008-04-22
Packaged: 2017-10-04 15:04:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/31551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smirnoffmule/pseuds/smirnoffmule
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After finding Tosh's message, Ianto considers writing a note of his own, but things don't really go to plan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Death Note

That night in his diary, Ianto wrote nothing but dates.

_17th July 1975 – 28th March 2008. 14th February 1980 – 28th March 2008. _

Most of the personal entries he made took a similar form. His notes on artefacts and rift activity were detailed, and occasionally even illustrated, but sometimes in amongst them there would be just a word, a phrase, a list, a snatch of verse, a sequence of numbers meaningful only to Ianto (although trust Jack to know by heart or by instinct any figure which might pertain to him). It was a talent of Ianto's, something he'd practised, paring down the language at his disposal, using only what he needed the most to record a moment fully for himself, so that later he could bring back to life every raw or bitter or bright emotion with just a glance. The combination of depth and economy appealed to him. It was a fairly pointless talent, granted, especially since most of what he wrote would only ever be meaningful to himself, but he took a kind of pride and triumph in it none the less. It was like composing a haiku, and probably the closest he'd ever come. Ianto had an instinct for poetry, but little inclination to practise.

He drew a line under his dates for emphasis. Thinking of haikus made him think of Toshiko. Not just the Japanese connection, although that was the path that brought him there, but because she might have liked them. She would have appreciated the economy too, and the clear cut rules, and the shortness. She wouldn't have had time for long poems, or much seen the point of gushing with words like a tap left on. Seventeen syllables were just enough. A pocket poem to eat on the go. If she had been here, next to him now, he would have asked her if she knew any. Would have been interested to know. She would have looked up from her work, met his eyes unseeing for a moment as she brought herself to reality, and then laughed her little laugh at the randomness of his question. She would have thought a moment before replying, because she was not a natural chatterer and liked to think before she spoke. Not like Owen, whose mouth ran without breaks sometimes, whose eyes were taking the piss before his mouth even opened. Bollocks, he would have chimed in, eager to be distracted. A load of wank. Tosh would not have stopped talking, though she had a way of flicking her eyes at Owen without looking at him. She might have done that. And she might have told Ianto a haiku in English or taught him one in Japanese, or they might have tried to make one up together, a silly one with awful puns (most of them his). Tosh would have been good at it. Owen would have said he could do better, which he couldn't, but it would give him an excuse to try and join in. Jack would have chimed in with a dirty limerick or two, and Gwen would have laughed at them all, laughed like she cried now, without guile or self-censorship. It would have filled fifteen minutes between aliens.

It had been three days. Three days like this, where for very thought Ianto half-articulated, there was another thought on the edge of it – what would Tosh think of this, what would Owen say to that? What would they be doing, what would they be thinking? It was like some awful parody of being in love. Even as he'd scrubbed what was left of Toshiko off the floor, he'd imagined her politely stepping past him on the stairs on her way to the lab, a little hand on his shoulder to steady herself, her head on one side as she smiled at him. Imagined Owen leaning over the walkway, telling him he'd missed a spot. Seventeen syllables wasn't a lot really, if you thought of what he'd written down with just four dates. Two entire lives.

Those dates, he had thought, would stand solid enough to be a monument, but clinical enough not to make him cry. He did not want to cry, since crying didn't seem to help, and it seemed wasteful to be shedding empty tears, wasteful and indulgent, like bad poetry. It was only when he thought of what those numbers stood for, brackets for a vibrant pocket of life in the empty expanse of time, that he had to stop and close his diary and breathe for a while. It was the nothingness that knocked it out of him. The before and the after. He'd been so wrong, it wasn't clinical at all, it was everything, everything that ever was, written horizons wide on the page in front of him, those dates completely ineffective as fences to contain the sprawl of empty existence. And he was thinking of fucking haikus. No neatness or order here. If Tosh had liked haikus, what would she make of an infinity of nothingness so vast it made a mockery of life spans?

He got to his feet abruptly then, unable to stop himself moving. It was Tosh's desk he'd been sitting at, diary open in front of him, leaking time everywhere. He looked upwards, past the low lights, to Jack's office, and saw a movement, a flash of blue shirt. Low lights, late light. Myfanwy a flicking shadow up above. Breathing carefully, he closed his diary, not wanting to look at it anymore. Lacking another target, he was angry at the words in it. Angry at life, for sputtering out half way through like a broken reel at the cinema. Last week, if last week were a real and tangible thing that was still back there somewhere, they'd still be there, and always would be. And yet here, stopped. Finished before they were complete, as blameless in death as though they'd always been. For a moment, he wanted nothing more than to shout for Jack to come down here, to grab him by the lapels, to shake him, to demand he give answers to these questions, the whys and why nots of being alive and then not being, and then to collapse into noisy howls all down Jack's shirt front (which he would then have to wash).

But then Jack didn't really have answers. Jack kept on going regardless, another death here and there, another grief, another sorrow, piling up like poker chips across the ages. The end is where we start, he'd said, because for him there was no other choice. He didn't get to stop. When Ianto went, he wouldn't feel the hurt, but Jack would.

With this thought, he pushed away his chair and went to go upstairs, but he stopped in his tracks when he saw Jack emerging from his office, coming down. Jack must have been watching him, and seen him jump up. Their eyes met, and they both stopped dead like they'd collided. Ianto held his position with his foot on the bottom stair, unwilling to give way, uncertain for a moment if he really did want company. Jack took himself back up the few steps he'd descended and leaned himself on the railing, peering down.

"Are you okay, Ianto?" he asked. This was a very difficult question to answer. Ianto turned away, moved back to Tosh's desk to tidy his diary away.

"Just catching up with some stuff," he said. He sat down again, his back to Jack, and listened to him descend the stairs, his footsteps careful, was aware of him moving up behind him, even felt him reach out a hand before he felt the touch on his shoulder. Jack's touch was tentative at first, but strengthened when Ianto leaned back into him. He felt so tired all of a sudden, like every year he'd ever lived had just caught up with him.

"What are you doing?" Jack asked. Hadn't he just said? Ianto thought, his brain trying to make it funnier than it was. When even your thoughts have a hysterical edge of laughter – that has to be bad. So Ianto told him;

"I was thinking of writing a note."

This was what had led him to his diary in the first place, not really for an entry but for a sheet of blank paper. If Tosh had had the foresight for a last goodbye, well, no one was going to out-foresight him. He'd wanted to handwrite it because words on a screen weren't as real to him as words on a page. The problem for him had been where to put it when it was written, since he didn't want it anywhere he'd have to see it again. He needed somewhere he never looked, where no one ever looked, but somewhere someone might conceivably look if he died. Tucked inside the instruction manual for the coffee machine, maybe. Jack's caress on his shoulder had paused, and then his hand moved away. With light footsteps, he took himself back across the room.

Ianto turned to watch him move carefully to Owen's desk, shift a pile of papers there, perch himself on the edge of it, organise his legs, organise his trousers, all without looking back at Ianto. Ianto felt a pang of guilt. He hadn't been trying to be morbid, or to make Jack feel bad, but he seemed to have succeeded. He envied Gwen then, who could express her grief as she expressed everything she felt, so easily and honestly. All his emotions just got tangled up in each other before they even left his brain.

He'd been on autopilot for the last few days, moving about his work like a ghost as he hadn't done since Lisa. Even his tears had felt automatic. With Jack, alone, he'd cried a little, while Jack had cried a lot. Jack's tears had seemed to cleanse him, but Ianto's left him feeling like screaming. One night, thinking of his mother, he'd made cocoa for after the tears. Jack, with a sniff, had called him an angel, which was so exactly what his mam would have said it was just plain eerie. The next night they were out of cocoa, so they'd kissed, fighting for each other's breath like drowning men, only to pull apart abruptly just before the point of no return. They had stood a moment, eyes low but locked, breathing hard, everything hard, but in the end, they'd turned away from each other. Ianto did not have the heart for a half hearted effort.

"What would you write?" Jack asked after a few minutes. It was probably cheating to ask, like seeing the bride before a wedding day. But in all honesty, Ianto had no idea what to write. This was a problem too. He thought he'd put a date:

_19th August 1983. _

And then a dash.

-

And then what? _Ianto Jones was here._ At least that much was probably true.

But he didn't want to say that to Jack. He wanted to say something of comfort, something to make things right. He wanted to say, "Never mind what I'd write, I'm not going anywhere, Jack. I'm here, right here, and I'm still alive, so please be with me," but he didn't, because to do so would be to invite an alien assassin to materialize through a rift breach right behind him, alien blaster in hand, and splatter him messily and noisily all over the hub and all over Jack's shirt, and it would have been awful and very ironic.

He started to smile at himself with this thought, but he quickly corrected his face when he caught Jack's quizzical look. Jack was unlikely to be ready to sound the depths of that particular topic for laughs, and there was no getting away from the fact than even if no alien assassin was immediately forthcoming, his words would become a lie sooner or later.

"Diet sheet for Myfanwy," he said instead. Jack snorted without humour. He was only eight or ten feet away from Ianto, but their eyes met across a gulf. His death was already coming between them, and it hadn't even happened yet. Their look lengthened, and Ianto had the strong feeling that if he broke it now and turned away, then something would change between them. It would go unremarked upon, and things would continue as normal for a time, but in the end – in the end – they would drift apart, and it would have started here. For a moment, he even thought that was what he wanted, but then he thought of how he'd fought for Lisa. Death had come between them too, though they hadn't known it would, his forever was not her forever, but hadn't it been worth it anyway? And if it hadn't, might he not just as well have died, full of terror and jagged metal edges, at Canary Wharf along with all the others? For a moment, the blind animal panic of that day rose in him again, but he rose above it. Ianto stepped towards Jack. He lived every inch of every foot between them, like it took long months of thirst and desert travel, but he got there.

"I didn't know what to write," he told him when he stood before him. That was honest at least, and he didn't know what else to give Jack now except for honesty. He reached out his hand and caught a handful of the front of Jack's shirt, just below the collar, and held on.

"Good," Jack said. Good what? Ianto thought, but the thought didn't last long. The kiss was as careful as their first time, and when he pulled back, he found a shirt button with trailing threads twisted between his fingers.

"Whoops," he said, but Jack was already kissing him again, laughing softly against him and making his lips buzz. Jack was sitting now on the edge of the desk, with both his legs wrapped tightly around one of Ianto's, his knee edging carefully higher. It was amazing what could be achieved with just friction. They got half undressed in the end, and used hands to help themselves along, and about half way through Ianto cried again into Jack's neck, but his hands didn't stop what they were doing all the while.

Afterwards, they sat on the floor together, clothes undone, and both a bit sticky, from tears as much as anything.

"I miss Tosh most in the mornings," Jack said. "She always said good morning like she meant it, like it might make the sun come out."

"I miss Owen from about two o'clock onwards," Ianto said. "Since that's when he'd become human. I miss him when I'm bored, because he'd always spot it, and come and pester me."

Jack stroked his hair while they talked, and he blew his nose on his shirt sleeve, which nearly caused a mutiny.

"Do you know any limericks?" Ianto asked him, in a lull.

Of course he bloody did.


End file.
